We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
"Politics is downstream of culture." That's what the man says, and it certainly seems true these days. It's what I have been thinking. Sales, marketing, and branding matter.
Optics, rhetoric and perception matter. Though the new Democratic Party’s economic policies are based on antiquated ideas of early 20th century progressivism and European welfare states, it, not the GOP, is perceived as party of forward looking ideas.
If Republicans have any hope of persuading independents, they’ll need charismatic people, people who look and sound like a modern America and not a boardroom of Brahmin, because real-world competency is no match for fresh packaging and a good slogan. Welcome to democracy.
The fact is that the same people who run around instructing Republicans that they need to appeal to Latinos, blacks and women are aghast when exactly that happens. Are liberals agonizing this week over the defeat of Florida's Congressman Allen West -- a black man -- by a whiter than vanilla liberal named Patrick Murphy? Are they made furious by the defeat of a conservative black woman named Mia Love by yet another liberal white boy in Utah? Hardly. They are doing somersaults. Are they celebrating the fact that a woman --Michele Bachmann -- will be returning to Congress after defeating yet another one of those damnable white men, Democrat Jim Graves? Are they signing up for Palin in 2016? Are you kidding? They are beyond teeth-gratingly depressed and angry at the mere existence of both Bachmann and Palin
A book: Far From the Tree - "He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender." http://www.amazon.com/Far-From-the-Tree-ebook/dp/B007EDOLJ2/ref=kinw_dp_ke
"I think a lot of stuff will be coming out over the next few weeks and months that was carefully kept off the radar before Election Day." http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/157280/
When American people can get beyond any infantile expectations of government, it can be wonderful to see what they will do for eachother. Believe it or not, when last night's snowstorm was predicted, the tiny number of inept and seemingly useless FEMA people fled the flooded boroughs of NYC in their SUVs. (See BAD SIGN: FEMA office on Staten Island closes 'due to weather')
The list of fools who have brought this disaster upon us certainly also will include New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the gelatinous clown who (a) hogged up a prime time spot at the Republican convention to sing his own praises; (b) embraced Obama as the hero of Hurricane Sandy; and (c) then refused to appear at campaign events in support of Romney's presidential campaign. Good luck with the remainder of your political future, governor. It is unlikely Republicans shall soon forget your perfidious betrayal.
The electorate is complicated, and factors of culture and geography can dictate party identification more than any specific policy. And yes, the Republicans rolled out some ghastly candidates. But that shouldn’t fool anyone; there’s been a fundamental shift in how Americans view government’s role in society, and the GOP is losing the argument.
There was no theoretical hope peddling this time around. There was a record. And Barack Obama also promised the most explicitly left-wing agenda in presidential history — more government, more taxes, more dependency, more bailouts, more regulations — and he won easily. He promised universal health care, more crony “investments” in proven economic losers, more interference in markets — yet he cruised.
Conservatives may be shocked by statist slogans such as the Democratic National Convention’s “government’s the only thing that we all belong to,” and they may be scandalized when they hear a candidate say “you didn’t build that,” but their neighbors … well, not so much. When you can’t beat a candidate who — judging him on his own terms — owns both a brutal economic record on jobs (this is the first time since FDR that a president has won re-election with an unemployment rate this high) and the feeblest economic recovery in the nation’s history, it’s time to rethink what you’re doing.
...as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign, its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.
I finally have my power back (no thanks to government but with thanks to private industry who had a big job to do) just in time for a cold Nor'easter with snow blowing in and, while deeply disappointed but not surprised about the national elections, I am finding them interesting to reflect upon.
A few things I have been thinking about are these:
- the MSM runs interference for Dems, with passion and without regard to their professional integrity. They have done so since Nixon. It's worth billions in campaign funds or, really, it's priceless. They still have vast reach and influence in the culture at large. Just ask Obama.
...there is the fact that relatively few Americans actually pay for the government they consume. To a greater extent than any other developed nation, we rely on upper-income people to finance our federal government. When that is combined with the fact that around 40% of our federal spending isn’t paid for at all–it is borrowed–it is small wonder that many self-interested voters are happy to vote themselves more government. Mitt Romney proclaimed that Barack Obama was the candidate of “free stuff,” and voters took him at his word.
- What's with Hispanics? Are they a solid voting bloc? Would Rubio have made a difference? Who knows. He was my choice.
- I give Mitt Romney a lot of credit for the nature of his campaign. A good man, not a rock star.
...when all was said and done, the lines of people who feed off the political machine were there, and the handlers of the machine cast their multiple votes and carried off their manifold frauds because their own private economy depended on it.
Every time people ask me why the left has such a grip on this country, my answer is because they worked for it. It's the answer that most people don't want to hear, but it's true. The left has been planning this for a while. They have been playing the long game, building the infrastructure and indoctrinating generations. And to beat them, we will have to do the same thing.
The right is 40 years behind the left and it remains a disorganized collection of potentials seeking a compass point.
The Times Of Israel just published a new piece from me: "Anti-Israel Circles Of Influence On Campus." The focus is on faculty. Students may suffer but they come and go. The professors stay on, to indoctrinate more students, many of whom will go on to leadership positions in the US or their countries of origin.
I use the example of one prominent US campus. Names are named. "There are many other professors at UCSD who could be highlighted. The ones chosen are to illustrate how the ripples of influence on attitudes toward Israel emanates from the core Israel haters to the euphemistic ones to the useful idiots, and thus on to gullible students and faculty." To quote myself, "What one sees is circles of influence, with the inner circle providing the splash and outer circles adding to the wave. It is that wave that creates a campus atmosphere which gives the impression that the entire campus is critical of Israel and that, it is charged, creates a hostile atmosphere for Jewish and pro-Israel students and faculty."
This is similar to what is occurring on many other US campuses. The leading figures at each interact with their like at other campuses and influence many others at other campuses. Exposure is an important remedy.
It is Tuesday, 8:18PM in San Diego, and Fox and CBS both just called the election for Obama.
The Democrats look to actually be picking up some Senate seats, the Republicans holding the House. All Republicans can hope and pray for during the next four years is that court challenges slow the Obamashackle to tie America down in regulatory chains, China keeps buying our increasing debt, that the very aged Supreme Court justices take their vitamins, and the international jackals transform into lambs. Not much to hang a hat on, is it? Actually, much reason to feel hanged. If you have children, better get them to learn to live frugally, study and work hard, and develop resilience and intestinal fortitude. That's all that will save them.
I'll leave it to others, maybe myself Wednesday morning, to sound smart about this debacle
‘The most important election since 1860′ - Jason (12) asked me which presidential elections were most important. I answered, 1800 for setting the Jeffersonian course of the new nation, 1828 for Andrew Jackson's version of "power to the people", 1860 for Lincoln, the Civil War, and the decades of recriminations after, 1932 for FDR's reshaping of America, 1980 for Reagan resteering America back to confidence and prominence, 2004 for rejecting defeatism, and 2012 for again a major fork in the road for America, which is looking from the electoral projections we're f**ked. What are your pick(s)?
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff of the Obama White House, said the election would be decided in “five states and 500 precincts,” and it may have been even fewer.
and
The United States is populated by groups of people who may as well be living in different countries. They have separate histories, cultures and visions for the future. They are two distinct nationalities, divided by mutual distrust and joined by mammoth public debt.
Thanks to all for keeping Maggie's going and/or for keeping me going in Sandy's aftermath. As we Conservative-Libertarians always say, "It takes a village." I had gotten so accustomed to working and sleeping in the cold (28 degrees F when we woke up this morning), the central heat of the past couple of hours feels a little suffocating.
Also, thanks to all those linemen and utility engineers from Canada and all over the country. Good guys who do real work and make real things. Finally, as in the Academy Awards, thanks to my Mom who kept calling to make sure if we were OK. Bless her heart, she had no heat or power in her place either, but she said "We're fine. We have blankets and candles. I can read next to the wood stove with your Dad."
Bruce has kindly agreed to do the honors once again tomorrow morning (yes, it feels tense!), but I'll unload some items right now:
It's been sort of amusing watching people from the right side of the blogosphere weigh in for over a year with political advice for Willard Romney. They'd take a flurry on the pizza guy. Look over there, they'd say! If only Romney was a fat, loudmouthed ex-congressman, smug for no reason, then he'd get somewhere. Yelling RON PAUL! would solve everything. Why doesn't he foam at the mouth like the porcine blowhard from New Jersey? Romney just smiled and kept going. Let's face it: Romney is the Amiable Terminator. He won't stop until he's shaken the hand of every Sarah Connor in the phonebook, and asked each in turn if she needs some canned food to tide her over until payday. Then he goes back to the phonebook and starts in on all the Sarah Connellys.
Romney is a rare thing in American public life. He is what he is. You can see how pleasant, but stiff, he is in that video. He cannot be what he is not, even while his position requires that he mix with people who are not like him. Some might call that good manners. People who have no manners don't recognize good manners in others. They call it standoffishness, or aloofness, or call you a robot for being polite. Many see decency as a kind of accusation. There's no other way to evaluate the Republican response to Romney. They don't know what to make of a decent, earnest person. They were hoping for devious so they could win. The other side does that constantly, why shouldn't we? Romney's not interested. He owes you nothing if he loses. You owe him a lot for him even taking up the cudgels on your behalf. He's successful and happy and politics is bucket of guts to step in for a person like him.
Blog writers are just blog commenters that go first, and they all know what Romney should be doing. They envision the perfect candidate -them. I might point out to these kings of that rock there to this clod of earth under their shoes, that Romney got himself elected Governor of Massachusetts. You're giving political advice to a Mormon Republican who figured out how to be elected governor of Massachusetts.
Romney's detractors on the left aren't worth talking about. Romney and his family could be defamed --and Lord, weren't they -- but there's close to nothing in his personal or public life that isn't above reproach. People are imperfect creatures of course, but every once in a great while you meet people who seem incapable of deliberate misbehavior. The human foibles we are all subject to can be teased into imprecations of malice, but any reasonable person can see there's no there, there in the Oakland of Romney's misdeeds. He's a nice person, a capable and commendable businessman, a competent and genial public administrator, he's married to a nice person, they raised a large crop of nice people together, and so forth.
I come not to praise Romney, nor to bury him in predictions and advice. I'd just like to express my thanks to him, here, where he surely will not see it, for allowing me, once in my life, to vote for an entirely decent, honorable, and capable person to be the chief magistrate of the United States. That has never happened to me before. To me, he cannot lose. America might. It won't be his fault.
It's just gravy that a vote for him is a vote against his opponent, who is, and always has been a malicious, callow, greedy, grasping, low-rent A-hole. I won't even mention it.
- LBJ's federal flood insurance is a perfect example of unintended consequences. The perverse incentive was to encourage people to build on flood plains and coastal areas. Yes, flood insurance is subsidized by you.
- Said by Newt on the radio today: "Barack Obama is a show horse, not a work horse."
- Threw out everything in both fridges and freezers today. Bummer. However, I cooked the bacon hoping for the best, and made bacon and tomato sandwiches. Delicious. I even used the warm mayo from the fridge. And I am still fine.
- Pupette evacuated from NYC decided that living in the cold and dark was getting old, so finagled a trip to San Francisco.
- None of the computer systems I have had access to can do what my own can. Quite annoying to be off all the grids.
- Received this email today from our occasional contributor Bulldog in New Jersey. It begins here, more below the fold with some of my comments:
I'm sure my problems are minor compared to the Doc's Big C - or even compared to the hundreds of thousands who have lost loved ones, friends, homes, etc. It's clear this storm has been devastating. And I agree with my governor that this is not a political situation - however, the night before the storm I did see Obama functionaries commenting on Romney's stance regarding FEMA, so as far as I'm concerned, he drew first blood in the politicization of the storm.
I won't go too political. No need to, and it's not worth it. Christie's stance so far has been correct, at least pre-storm, though post-storm I think he's gotten a bit soft.
But I'm at a disadvantage. I have no power or heat. I haven't had much in the way of news for 4 days, at least not more than I can get on an iPhone. I have been out of work for a week, and may miss more. Since I just took a new position (hence my lack of posting lately), missing work is a bit of a problem. But the company is good about my situation.
The founder and Chairman of GoDaddy.com pledges $1-million to match your donations to the Semper Fi Fund, which aids wounded warriors. He is a proud former Marine Lance Corporal who takes the opportunity of celebrating our 237th Anniversary on November 10th and Veterans Day on November 11th to go beyond us Marines' usual pride in leading on land, sea and air to salute members of all our armed forces. They have all proved themselves worthy as proud warriors over the past decade, and the wounded need your support to rejoin and enrich us civilians with their unmatchable spirit and values.
They gave a lot. You can, at least, give a little. Thanks.
Do I presume we have some bi-cyclists (that is, cyclists who go both ways) in the audience? Is there any merit to this? The video's kind of lame, article is here.
There's not much power in New England, and NYC is a mess too. I'll try to post some photos but DSL isn't broadband. Trees and power lines down everywhere, and even NYC isn't functioning very much. Downtown still without power, and the Bird Dog family is being heated by fireplace, working, cooking, and reading by oil lamp.
Almost like camping. Not too cold, fortunately. Only down to 43 F last night.
Those of you who occasionally drop by Theo's are aware of this guy, but I haven't seen any of his stuff elsewhere. Some of it's simply brilliant, some wittier than hell, and some just laugh-out-loud funny.
The author is Stilton Jarlsberg, his Hope 'n Change site is here.
Astronauts on a mission to Mars could lose nearly half their muscle strength during the long trip, giving them the physiques of senior citizens by the time they arrived, according to a new study. Prolonged exposure to weightlessness could cause astronauts to lose more than 40 percent of their muscle strength even with regular exercise, researchers said. On a long voyage, a healthy 30- to 50-year-old astronaut could end up with the strength of an 80-year-old.
A 10-month trip to Mars would cause such extreme muscle deterioration that astronauts would find it difficult to perform even routine tasks, let alone move around the Martian surface in spacesuits, according to the study, which was led by Robert Fitts of Marquette University.
And yet I found that Mars wasn't an entirely happy subject in Houston—especially among people who believe that humans, not only robots, should be exploring there.
The point is, we've had half a century to work on this problem, and apart from slapping a few treadmills around, not only have they not gained any ground, but the problems are only getting worse. As durations in space last longer and longer, more and more problems arise. Blindness occurring later in life is the latest small snag.
Then there was the day I broke so many hearts by reporting that mermaids don't exist. Rarely have I been so cruel.
Now here's the latest little dream to be shattered like glass:
A study by Western Australia's Murdoch University concluded that DNA cannot survive more than 6.8 million years - a finding that effectively rules out the tantalising prospect of replicating dinosaurs. Most dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago.
"We've been permanently plagued by this Jurassic Park myth that's been kicking around since the early nineties," lead researcher Mike Bunce told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Yeah, well, welcome to the Hollywood Curse. Probably 50 million people believe the global warming horrors they saw in The Day After Tomorrow are real. Another 50 mil probably think the government can watch your every step via spy satellite as in Enemy Of The State. Another 50 mil probably believe President Kennedy wasn't assassinated by a lone gunman thanks to Oliver Stone's JFK. The list goes on and on.
But still, no horrific velociraptors eviscerating us with their 6-inch talons in the noonday sun, spilling our entrails onto the ground as they enjoy a tasty little snack?
It's sad, sometimes, when life doesn't imitate art.
Another sign that Minnesota is in play? Bill Clinton will be an active surrogate this week, campaigning in Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Colorado, and — you guessed it — Minnesota. The state has ten electoral votes, which would be a helpful boost for Mitt Romney, who has no easy path (although there are ways) to the White House without winning Ohio’s 18 electoral votes.
We recently posted a report of the closing of the last brownstone quarry in the US. Manhattan and Brooklyn have tons of old brownstone buildings, commonly entire blocks of them. Some people like the look and some do not, but it is not a very durable building stone.
I stumbled on this brownstone for sale on the Upper West Side (87th St, just off the Park). If I were a rich guy, I'd enjoy owning a place like this with the top floor used as living quarters for the help. Like most buildings from the era (1850-1910), each brownstone has a garden out back. Looks great from theoutside, but if you look at the video you'll hate what they did inside when converting it to apartments.
For every 100 industrial workers in December 2010, there were 73 “workers” receiving disability payments. Between January 2010 and December 2011, the U.S. economy created 1.73 million nonfarm jobs — but almost half as many (790,000) workers became disability recipients. This trend is not a Great Recession phenomenon: In the 15 years ending in December 2011, the United States added 8.8 million nonfarm private sector jobs — and 4.1 million workers on disability rolls.
Barack Obama may win or lose the election in ten days, but, in either case, he will emerge much diminished by the sort of disgusting, mendacious, fear-mongering, low-life campaign he has run. A new low for the Presidency.
Watching the final debate, the more I considered Barack Obama's deplorably non-presidential affect and attitude; his reliance on corny, crudely-made zingers; and his almost pathological string of lies and distortions, the more it struck me that, at some level, he knows this is over. His speeches since then show an edge that belies the old “No Drama Obama” who was going to heal the bitter partisan divisions of the past.
The aura of a losing campaign is unique...
and
Romney is drawing astounding crowds at event after event – Denver's Red Rocks event was at standing-room only and over 25,000 people were turned away. This story is repeated almost daily: Romney is drawing the kind of crowds Barack Obama pulled in 2008. The momentum isn'ta bluff or a headfake; Republicans are lit up in the same way they were in 2010. It's happening in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada and all the battleground states.
Obama is largely reduced to trawling college campuses for political jailbait, stroking the shreds of his coalition in the increasingly desperate hope of getting at least a few salvageable video clips out of each day. Big Bird, binders, and bayonets don't comprise a sweeping vision of a second Obama term and it shows. Vice-President Malaprop wanders Ohio diners, touching people's food and getting biker chicks to sit in his lap. It's a campaign in trouble, and they know it.
Over the last four years, Obama’s faithful could and did blame third parties — the banks, the rich, Bush, Congress, Israel, the tea party, the Olympic committee, etc. — for nearly all of the president’s failures. They were fighting for themselves as much as they were fighting for Obama. But many gave up the fight on October 3.
The cumulative evidence is now evident to all with even bad eyesight that Benghazi is sad proof of what conservative critics have been saying for the past four years, that President Obama, his appointees and administration lack the dedication, insight and guts to defend the United States honorably or resolutely.
Democrats were known as the Party of national security weakness for a generation after their betrayal of South Vietnam and Jimmy Carter’s callowness in the face of the Iranian radicals. Aging memories, war tiredness, and big lies from the Obama administration managed to recover some national security credibility.
Now, it’ll take another generation for Democrats to, depending upon circumstances, recover some national security credibility. How focused and resolute Republicans behave will be important. Otherwise, abandon all hope for the US.
The latest revelation of betrayal of the men on the ground fighting desperately in Benghazi makes every veteran I know furious, makes every conservative voice howl in anger, but has yet to break the silence at Yahoo News, Washington Post, New York Times. They may be trying to run out the clock to November 6. That finger in the dike will not hold, possibly before November 6 and certainly after. The maggots in the chain of command in the White House, Pentagon, State Dept., and CIA responsible deserve to have their names engraved on a prominent monument to cowardice.
When you are fighting for this country, you run to the sound of the fire and the calls for help. If someone tries to tell you not to go, and you know people are dying, you go anyway. If you don't know all the facts on the ground, as Panetta claimed, you go anyway. You go because the rule has always been that when you are in trouble and call for help, help will get there as quickly and overwhelmingly as humanly possible. You go for them because you know they would come for you. If it ever becomes known that the cavalry will not be coming to your rescue, then you will tell them where to stick it when they ask you to put your butt on the line. When the day comes, and now it may have, when it is known that we are not willing to sacrifice more casualties in an effort, no matter how futile it may be, to respond to pleas for help from the men on the line, we will no longer have men willing to put themselves on that line. Fix it now, before those men, in whom so much confidence is placed, lose confidence in us.
THE DETERMINISTIC GUIDANCE (PARTICULARLY THE 00Z ECMWF) SHOW PRESSURE SOLUTIONS WELL BEYOND WHAT HAS EVER BEEN OBSERVED NEAR THE NEW JERSEY/NEW YORK COAST (EVEN EXCEEDING THE 1938 LONG ISLAND EXPRESS HURRICANE) EARLY IN THE MEDIUM RANGE PERIOD.
This is what climate change looks like! The Pilgrims experienced one of these. Stock up on canned goods and batteries cigars, beer, charcoal for the grill, and gas for the chain saw. If Maggie's server is down next week, the storm will be why.
Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting the policies that have ruined them to the rest of the country....
and
Illinois politicians, including the present President of the United States, have wrecked one of the country’s potentially most prosperous and dynamic states, condemned millions of poor children to substandard education, failed to maintain vital infrastructure, choked business development and growth through unsustainable tax and regulatory policies — and still failed to appease the demands of the public sector unions and fee-seeking Wall Street crony capitalists who make billions off the state’s distress.
As you might have heard, a court in Italy has convicted seven scientists of manslaughter because they failed to predict an earthquake that struck some village and killed a bunch of people.
People living in non-earthquake-reinforced buildings in an area known for having violent earthquakes, I might add.
An Italian court sentenced scientists to jail time for not having a functioning crystal ball ahead of the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila. The arguments of science and reason fell on deaf ears. Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun has an Italian court been so wrong about science.
Today, a court in the central Italian city of L'Aquila, 380 years after that miscarriage of justice, sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years in jail [and $10.2 million in fines] on manslaughter charges for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that left more than 300 people dead.
More articles on this travesty of justice, sensibility and reason:
Is There Such a Thing 
FEMA: 
It is Tuesday, 8:18PM in San Diego, and Fox and CBS both just called the election for Obama. 
One myth I handily destroyed in an article a while back was the possibility of space travel. And I don't mean this garbage:
Crew of tall ship HMS Bounty 
Tsk-tsk, Italy.